Mother Courage and Her Children – Bertolt Brecht

Ziller Building | Main Stage

First Performance: December 4, 2024

The masterpiece of the great playwright, author, and poet Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, premieres on December 4 on the Main Stage of the Ziller Building, directed by Stathis Livathinos. A profoundly anti-war play and at the same time a powerful parable about the struggle for survival, about the most tragic loss—the death of one’s children—and the ever-costly price of profit.

Mother Courage and Her Children was written in Scandinavia in 1938–1939. It is based on The Life of the Arch-Swindler and Vagabond Courasche (1669), part of the monumental novel Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, which depicts a world of deception and wandering in times of war. Seeking to present “society as capable of change,” as he himself emphasized, the German writer describes events set during the Thirty Years’ War in Europe as a cry of anguish over the impending Second World War, which would break out just one year later. Despite its clear anti-war dimension and its unmistakable message about the suffering brought about by capitalism, “Brecht’s work avoids preaching, and that is why it becomes more powerful,” as Roland Barthes enthusiastically exclaimed at the play’s Paris premiere.

The play follows the adventuress Anna Fierling—known on the battlefields as Mother Courage—in her struggle for survival. A ruthless peddler who sells goods to soldiers, she vainly tries to shield her three children from the destructive vortex of war: her eldest son Eilif, the younger Swiss Cheese (Emil), and her mute daughter Kattrin. For this shrewd woman, profit will always come before family happiness—even as she pays the highest price: the tragic loss of her own children and the sacrifice of every value they embody—courage, honesty, sincerity. In times of war, every notion of morality and justice is violated. Or is that true only in wartime?

In his first direction on the Main Stage of the National Theatre, Stathis Livathinos tackles Brecht for the first time as well. The music and songs of Mother Courage are signed in a new version—rather than Paul Dessau’s original—by his close collaborator Thodoris Ampazis, while the cast is made up, for the most part, of young and gifted actors.

About Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German poet, playwright, and director, and one of the most important reformers of modern theatre. His works reflect his anti-militarist and Marxist views, revealing influences from Chinese and Russian theatre, as well as from the work of Frank Wedekind and Erwin Piscator. During the rise of Nazism, Brecht went into self-imposed exile in various European countries and in the United States. There he collaborated with significant artists, but Hollywood never truly embraced him. In 1949, after returning to Germany, he founded the Berliner Ensemble together with his second wife, Helene Weigel—one of the world’s most important German theatre companies. He developed his own form of epic theatre, according to which audiences—through specific techniques—are “distanced” from the characters and the action, so that the performance does not become an illusion of reality or merely an emotional trigger, but rather an occasion for reflection and critical thought. He died at the age of 58 from a heart attack, leaving behind an immense legacy in 20th-century theatre.

Source: National Theatre of Greece